"No intelligent investor would create a situation in which the founders had no incentive to succeed. They want founder's interests to be aligned with theirs."

That's not necessarily true. VCs want management's interests to be aligned with theirs. However, there's no particular reason for them to care whether management consists of founders or VC cronies, and most would probably prefer the cronies.

I've worked for startups where VCs liked the technology, liked the market positioning, but weren't particularly fond of the founding team. So they invest their money, and at the first sign of trouble, force the founders out. They ended up losing the auction for the company's IP (one of the founders bid on it through an employee proxy and took it to China), but that's not to say they didn't try...

I suspect this happens more often than entrepreneurs would like to think. It's the same VC that was featured on an essay here by a certain prominent Lisp hacker...